Archived news and commentary: October 29 - November 4, 2001

2001/12/24 - 2001/12/31
2001/12/17 - 2001/12/23
2002/12/10 - 2001/12/16
2002/12/03 - 2001/12/09
2001/11/26 - 2001/12/02
2001/11/19 - 2001/11/25
2001/11/12 - 2001/11/18
2001/11/05 - 2001/11/11
2001/10/29 - 2001/11/04
2001/10/22 - 2001/10/28
2001/10/15 - 2001/10/21
2001/10/08 - 2001/10/14
2001/10/01 - 2001/10/07
2001/09/24 - 2001/09/30
2001/09/17 - 2001/09/23
2001/09/11 - 2001/09/16

News and commentary:

"British Muslim support for terror" (The Sunday Times, 2001/11/04)
"Four out of every 10 British Muslims believe Osama Bin Laden is justified in mounting his war against the United States. And more than one in 10 say the attacks on the World Trade Center were justified... A Sunday Times survey, the first large-scale poll of the Muslim community since the start of the bombing campaign against Afghanistan, shows 40% believe Bin Laden has cause to wage war against America and a similar proportion say Britons who choose to go to fight alongside the Taliban are right to do so."

"Doves are wrong. We are morally right to fight for peace" (Anne McElvoy, Independent, 2001/11/04)
"...it has led in the West to the idea that the use of military power is inherently bad and that "anything" must be better than what we are doing now. Well anything isn't. The world cannot prosper and become more peaceful if the West does not use its combined strength to defeat Osama bin Laden and the activities he sponsors. ... The fact that war is risky is not exactly a new discovery. But one of the sly tricks doves play against hawks is to suggest that anything that does not go well in a military campaign means that it is an unmitigated disaster. As they aren't in favour of doing anything very much, they can't, by definition, get anything wrong. ... Whatever choices we make now and in the coming months will have both good and bad consequences over a very long time. Yes, we are taking risks and things will go wrong. But I have still not heard a serious alternative that does not entail the West crying, "Stop the world: it's giddy and nasty and I want to get off and go home." It won't let go of us that easily."

"The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism" (Jonathan Rosen, The New York Times Magazine, 2001/11/04)
"And yet what I kept hearing in those first days in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center is that it was our support of Israel that had somehow brought this devastation down on us. It was a kind of respectable variant of the belief that the Mossad had literally blown up the World Trade Center. ... But since most of the players in the Middle East do not accept the existence of Israel, since ''solving the Mideast crisis'' would for them entail a modern version of Hitler's final solution, the phrase takes on weird and even sinister overtones when it is blandly employed by well-intentioned governments calling for a speedy solution. And this Orwellian transformation of language is one of the most exasperating and disorienting aspects of the campaign against Israel. It has turned the word ''peace'' into a euphemism for war. ... What happened on Sept. 11 is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil intend evil. This comes with the dawning awareness that weapons of mass destruction did not vanish with the Soviet Union; the knowledge that in fact they may pose a greater threat of actually being used in this century, if only in a limited fashion, is sinking in only now. ... The demonizing language that is used about Israel in some of the European press, and about Jews in the Arab press, is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930's. I grew up thinking I was living in the post-Holocaust world and find it sounds more and more like a pre-Holocaust world as well."

 

Saturday, November 3, 2001

News and commentary:

"Taliban turns doctors into killers" (Stewart Bell, National Post, 2001/11/03)
"The Taliban has committed so many atrocities during its five-year reign in Kabul that Afghans seem almost resigned, but even veteran military surgeon Mohammad Atiq was shocked to discover government opponents were being used as human blood banks. Dr. Atiq, an army surgeon who runs the Dasht-e Qala field hospital - a dirty canvas tent surrounded by mud walls - says he has examined the bodies of civilians and prisoners of war who had died after Taliban doctors removed large quantities of blood from their bodies. This brutal method of execution serves the dual purpose of killing government foes while keeping hospitals stocked with the blood needed to treat soldiers wounded in action. "I saw four or five people like this," says Dr. Atiq, whose mobile clinic treats critically injured civilians and Northern Alliance rebels wounded by the daily shelling and gunfire at the front line a few kilometres away. The Taliban keeps its victims alive for days, drawing their blood with a syringe every 24 hours until they succumb, he says. The blood is extracted by doctors on the orders of Taliban military officers. "They are army doctors and they make them do this by force," he says."

"Don't make Israel the first casualty" (Efraim Karsh, The Spectator, 2001/11/03)
"All this means that Arafat's talk about the implementation of UN resolutions is not motivated by a desire for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, something that was virtually his to take last year. Rather it is a euphemism for a "Greater Palestine" built on Israel's ruins. This is the interpretation that the Arabs have consistently given to the "right of return" in their political discourse since 1948 (albeit not when addressing Western audiences), and this is how the prominent Palestinian "moderate", Faisal al-Husseini, put it shortly before his untimely death last summer. Tactically "we may win or lose", he declared, "but our eyes will continue to aspire to the strategic goal, namely to Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea" - that is, to a Palestine in place of Israel. "Whatever we get now," he continued, "cannot make us forget this supreme truth." Western leaders, in their rush to impose these misconceptions on Israel, should not forget this "supreme truth" either."

"Bin Laden hits out at UN 'infidels'" (BBC News, 2001/11/03)
"Saudi-born militant Osama Bin Laden has condemned the United Nations as a "tool" for crimes against Muslims, in a new recorded video address. ... "Those who today are referring our tragedies to the United Nations and want to resolve them there are hypocrites, who try to deceive God and His prophet and the believers. Have our tragedies not resulted from the United Nations?" He said the United Nations had given Arab land "to the Jews" in 1947. "Those who claim to be leaders of the Arabs and who are still at the United Nations have disavowed what was revealed to Prophet Muhammad," he said." (See also full transcript of the speech: "Bin Laden rails against Crusaders and UN" (BBC News, 2001/11/03))

"Bin Laden popular in Saudi Arabia" (Frank Gardner, BBC News, 2001/11/03)
"Support for Osama Bin Laden appears to be running high in his native Saudi Arabia, while anger grows at the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan. Many Saudis refuse to believe that Bin Laden was connected to the terror attacks of 11 September. Instead, many hail him as a Muslim hero, who stands up to the United States. They hate the West for what they see as its biased policies against Muslims. They adore Bin Laden. ... The FBI says Bin Laden was behind the attacks in New York and Washington. But many Saudis insist that the Arabs on board the hijacked planes were just passengers, nothing more. It was an inside job, they say, by American fanatics, or maybe by Israelis."

"The nature of the beast" (David Limbaugh, TownHall, 2001/11/03)
"The new enemy is united by an extreme strain of the Muslim religion, but transcends national boundaries and exists throughout the world, including in the United States. It lurks in the shadows and is always poised to strike without warning. Consequently, unlike with our earlier enemies, it will be more difficult to observe changes in its behavior that may alert us to an impending attack. These factors, combined with the enemy's unconventional combat techniques, make it an especially challenging adversary. And to make matters worse, each time we defeat the enemy, new recruits will be born in sympathy with their conquered brethren. This is not to say that we cannot achieve a decisive victory over the terrorists – because we can and will – but we must recognize the likelihood that our victory will not be permanent. We will always have to be vigilant, perhaps even on high alert, and to that extent, our world has forever changed."

"A New Iranian Revolution?" (Michael Leeden, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/11/03)
"An event of world-historical potential is under way in one of the largest and most powerful countries of the Middle East, yet almost no one seems to have noticed. Ever since the night of Oct. 12, the citizens of Iran have repeatedly demonstrated against the murderous Shiite theocracy that has oppressed them for the past 22 years. The most recent demonstrations started Oct. 24 and ran for four successive nights in Tehran and other major cities. These events are unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic. They involved hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum. One secondhand account I received spoke of more than a million antigovernment demonstrators in Tehran alone. The first "victory" in our war on terror could be the fall of the regime in Iran."

News and commentary:

"The View From Inside" (The Atlantic, 2001/11/02)
An interview with one of my favourite foreign correspondents, Robert D. Kaplan ("The Coming Anarchy" (The Atlantic, February 1994) is a must-read.): "The problem with a lot of journalistic criticism of how the U.S. operated in the mid- and late eighties in Afghanistan is that journalists operate in this perfect universe, where every option is possible, while policy makers usually only have bad choices. And the bottom line was it was impossible to support the Afghans against the Soviets without the complete cooperation of Pakistan, because Pakistan provided the rear base. And Pakistan demanded a price. The price, though we were uncomfortable with it, was nevertheless still worth paying, in my opinion. Because what it led to was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe. To say that supporting the Afghans against the Soviets was not worth it is like saying fighting World War II was not worth it because it led to a forty-four year Cold War."

"Yes, This Is About Islam" (Salman Rushdie, The New York Times, 2001/11/02)
"If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side? ... Of course this is "about Islam." ... Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or so in growing radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief." These Islamists - we must get used to this word, "Islamists," meaning those who are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from the more general and politically neutral "Muslim" - include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Shiite revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world."

"Egypt's Al-Azhar Clerics: We declare war on America" (Special Dispatch No. 296, MEMRI, 2001/11/02)
"Dr. Abd Al-Sabour Shahin also discussed the differences between terrorism and Jihad: "The truth is that the way Islam uses the word "terrorism" is honorable, as Allah said: 'Make ready for them whatever you can of armed strength and of mounted pickets at the frontier, whereby you may daunt the enemy of Allah and your enemy.' The terrorism mentioned in this verse refers to intimidation or threat, not necessarily to damage. For this reason, accusing Islam or Muslims of terrorism is mistaken, because Muslims as a nation are the symbol of peace in the world and the Muslim nation has never attacked a neighboring nation..." ... In a similar vein, the Islamic Sheikh Youssef Al-Badri called on "Muslims to declare a Jihad against the Americans. We all must prepare for Jihad, because the strikes will reach even us, in many Islamic countries. What America and the West have done is an international crime... a great crime against humanity. This is a war against Islam, as the leaders of the West and the leaders of the U.S. have said. We have no choice but to declare our own position: Are we with Islam or are we with Bush? The answer is what will determine the fate of the Islamic nation in the new millennium."

"Crusade Propaganda" (Thomas F. Madden, National Review, 2001/11/02)
"The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. ... Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade's real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. ... The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy."

"U.S. unemployment soars" (CNNmoney.com, 2001/11/02)
"The U.S. unemployment rate rose sharply in October, the government said Friday, as employers cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in response to a sharp slowdown in the world's largest economy. ... Employers cut 415,000 jobs - the biggest number since 460,000 in May 1980 - compared with 213,000 in September. ... 'The numbers are very bad,' Heather Boushey, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told CNNfn's Before Hours program. 'This is really the first sign that the events of Sept. 11 have taken a disastrous toll on the U.S. economy.'"

"Striking parallels between Israel and US" (Alan M. Dershowitz, The Jerusalem Post, 2001/11/02)
"The parallels between the dangers now faced by the United States and those long confronted by Israel become more striking every day. On September 11, the United States was victimized by an outrageous act of terrorism directed against innocent civilians. The entirely appropriate military response has been carefully calculated to minimize civilian casualties. Yet inevitably there have been some. These deaths and injuries of Muslims have been used by America's enemies to cast us into the role of powerful aggressors, and those who support terrorism as helpless victims."

"New York doesn't want your $10m, I told Saudi prince" (Rudolph Giuliani, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/02)
"This was an attack upon the very idea of a free and inclusive society, the rule of law, political, religious, and economic freedom, and our respect for human life. This was an attack upon civilisation. To entertain any thought of moral relativism that attempts to justify this attack - through historical, political or religious interpretations - is an assault on the very principles of civilisation."

"More Muslim enemies from within" (Michelle Malkin, TownHall, 2001/11/02)
"There was a venomous hatefest in the nation's capitol on Halloween night. It was hosted by Malik Zulu Shabazz of the militant New Black Panther Party. Deadly rhetorical spores of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism permeated the air for more than four hours. ... If this event had been an anti-Muslim rally, the story would be front-page news. Editorialists and academics would be decrying racial and religious intolerance. ... Instead, the Muslim marathon of malevolence I watched Wednesday night on C-SPAN-2 received absolutely no mainstream media criticism. In fact, it got no mainstream newspaper press coverage at all -- an especially ugly irony since it was held at the prestigious National Press Club in the heart of Washington, D.C. ... Shabazz defended Osama bin Laden, blamed President Bush for the 9-11 attacks, called our founding fathers "snakes" and likened them to terrorists, lambasted Catholicism, Christians and Jews, and repeated his avaricious call for societal reparations to blacks. ... One audience member claimed that the hijackings, destruction and deaths were "nothing more than a Hollywood lie." An "imam" named Abdul Alim Musa agreed, assailing the "Zionists in Hollywood, the Zionists in New York, and the Zionists in D.C." who "all collaborate" to oppress blacks and Muslims."

"Davis Warns of Threat to Bridges" (John M Glionna and Dan Morain, Los Angeles Times, 2001/11/02)
"Gov. Gray Davis warned Thursday of a "credible" terrorist threat against major bridges in California, including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, but federal officials called the threats "uncorroborated" and expressed annoyance with the governor. "He certainly didn't get in contact with us," said one senior Bush administration official, who added that the White House also was unhappy with Davis' actions. On Wednesday, FBI officials sent a confidential alert to law enforcement agencies nationwide warning about the possibility of six rush-hour attacks on West Coast bridges sometime between today and Wednesday."

Added one new section in Archive:
Author index. An alphabetical index of commentators, historians etc. and their archived news and commentary. From Fouad Ajami to Robert S. Wistrich.

 

Thursday, November 1, 2001

News and commentary:

"Fevered Pitch" (Franklin Foer, The New Republic, 2001/11/01)
Foer on conservative activist "Grover Norquist's strange alliance with radical Islam": On the afternoon of September 26, George W. Bush gathered 15 prominent Muslim- and Arab-Americans at the White House. With cameras rolling, the president proclaimed that "the teachings of Islam are teachings of peace and good." It was a critically important moment, a statement to the world that America's Muslim leaders unambiguously reject the terror committed in Islam's name.
Unfortunately, many of the leaders present hadn't unambiguously rejected it. To the president's left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas "freedom fighters." Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that "we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list." And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who last fall told a Washington crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans, "America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come." Days later, after a conservative activist confronted Karl Rove with dossiers about some of Bush's new friends, Rove replied, according to the activist, "I wish I had known before the event took place."
If the administration was caught unaware, it may be because they placed their trust in one of the right's most influential activists: Grover Norquist." (Note: The article is subscriber only, but can also be found at FreeRepublic.)

"We are waging a just war" (David Pryce-Jones, The New Criterion, from the November 2001 issue)
"For the past decade or so, Muslim extremists have been on the march, fighting neighbors of other religions wherever they find them: Hindus in Kashmir, Jews in Israel, Orthodox Russians in Chechnya, animists and Christians in Africa. In the perspective of the suicide bombers, Americans are Westerners but also Christians, therefore the principal legitimate objects of holy war. These Muslim extremists have been trying to open their version of an ideological and armed struggle with global implications: Muslims and as much of the Third World as possible versus democracy. This ambition is now out in the open. ... Premeditated killing of unknown people in an act that simultaneously kills oneself requires a life-denying hate so exceptional that it is in a realm of fanaticism all its own. Such hate signifies a total human failure. This corresponds to the turmoil of the Muslim world today. Each and every Muslim country faces intractable problems of demography, lack of resources and skills, ethnic and religious strife, and selfish government; each and every Muslim suffers from this jumble of assorted ills. As if that were not enough, Muslim extremists and even some moderates have come to believe that everything wrong with their world is the fault of the Jews. This is partly a relic from the tribal past, and partly another mistaken interpretation of the present. They think in a sort of syllogism. Jews are wicked by definition. America helps Jews. Therefore America is wicked. And yet another false syllogism: Saddam Hussein is an Arab, America wishes to remove Saddam Hussein, therefore America persecutes Arabs."

"Saudis Debate the Annihilation of Christians and Jews" (Special Dispatch No. 295, MEMRI, 2001/11/01)
"Khaled Muhammad Batrafi, a Saudi columnist for the London daily Al-Hayat, recently published an article headlined "Why do we hate the People of the Book?" (namely – Christians and Jews) in which he tells of a religious argument he had with a friend regarding the annihilation of Christians and Jews.": "The preacher [at the mosque] called for the death and annihilation of Christians and Jews; he called to make their children orphans and their wives widows. After prayers, I told my friend: 'These are words of heresy.' My friend replied: 'Do you support [the Christians and Jews]? If so, the words of Allah apply to you: ‘Whoever supports them - belongs to them.' ... [I said:] Can a preacher with a heart full of animosity towards the believers of other religions speak with enthusiasm to persuade them [that Islam] is a religion of mercy and tolerance? Allah, do not punish us for the deeds of these idiots."

"New Prejudices for Old - The Euro press and the Intifada" (Tom Gross, National Review, 2001/11/01)
An excellent exposé of the anti-Israeli - and sometimes anti-Semitic - bias of European media in the reporting of the Israel-Palestinian conflict: "On June 4, 2001 - three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis and wounded over 100 others at a disco, in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire - the [Spanish] liberal daily Cambio 16 published (on page 3) a cartoon of a hook-nosed Sharon, wearing a yarmulke on his head, sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: 'At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect.'"

"Our Friends the French, Part Deux" (Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard, 2001/11/01)
"The country has been exercised for much of the past month by incidents at a match between the French and Algerian national soccer teams at the Stade de France outside Paris on October 6. It had been long planned as a "friendship match," the first such meeting since Algeria became independent of France almost four decades ago. ...
It's not just that the match had to be called off when a gang of Algerians and French-Algerians stormed the field early in the game. ("We'd've lost the match anyway," said one fatalistic Algerian.) It's that when the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, was played before the match, 60,000 French citizens of Arab descent booed it. (Or whistled at it, as they do in France.) A smaller number then began to chant the name of Osama bin Laden."

"Idiocy Watch #9" (The New Republic, 2001/11/01)
It never stops, does it? The ninth installment of "all the dumb and outrageous things being said and written about America and the terrorists":
"Someone asked a question about pure evil, citing the terrorist attacks on America as an example. With great presence, [Ruth] Rendell replied that we could not categorise such attacks as evil, since they were carried out from the highest motives and in the name of freedom. The audience hated this reply - there was a collective and audible shudder. Yet who reading Bin Laden's speeches can doubt it? There is no cynicism in the man - he has never heard of a spin doctor.... We need not sympathise with him to recognise a gulf between the pragmatic concerns of the west and the fervent beliefs of the east. How to bridge east and west is the question - and bombs are not the answer." - Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian, October 16."

"War for Civilization" (David F. Forte, National Review, 2001/11/01)
A continuation of the debate of where to draw the line in the war against terrorism: "Defining bin Laden outside of any authentic Islamic tradition provides the principle by which Muslims can reject those within Islam whose sectarian radicalism gives birth to Islam's antithesis. It provides the very basis by which the peaceful traditions of classical Islam can reject those legalistic avatars that have, wittingly or no, produced a greater threat to Islam than Western imperialism has ever been."

"The recession arrives" (Economist.com, 2001/11/01)
"On October 31st, President George Bush said the events of September 11th had shocked the American nation. On November 1st, the economic impact of that shock became clearer when new data showed that consumer spending plunged in September, while manufacturing activity fell to its lowest level in more than ten years. The grim figures came a day after government data showed that GDP shrank at an annual rate of 0.4% in the third quarter of the year: the first contraction since 1993."

"Bin Laden calls Pakistanis to arms" (BBC News, 2001/11/01)
"The prime suspect for the 11 September attacks on America, Osama Bin Laden, has apparently urged Pakistani Muslims to defend Islam against what he described as a Christian campaign.
News organisations including the BBC were sent copies of a letter - allegedly from Bin Laden - that describes the US-led military attacks against the Saudi-born militant and Afghanistan's Taleban regime as a conflict of religions." (See also: "Full text: Bin Laden's 'letter to Muslims'" (BBC News, 2001/11/01): "The world has been divided into two camps: One under the banner of the cross, as [US President George W] Bush, the head of infidelity, said, and another under the banner of Islam.")

"The Danger Within: Militant Islam in America" (Daniel Pipes, Commentary/danielpipes.org, from the November 2001 issue)
"Whether and to what degree the community as a whole subscribes to the Islamist agenda are, of course, open questions. But what is not open to question is that, whatever the majority of Muslim Americans may believe, most of the organized Muslim community agrees with the Islamist goal - the goal, to say it once again, of building an Islamic state in America. To put it another way, the major Muslim organizations in this country are in the hands of extremists. ... That a significant movement in this country aspires to erode its bedrock social and legal arrangements, including the separation of church and state, and has even developed a roadmap toward that end, poses a unique dilemma, especially at this moment."

"Hate Club" (James Graff, Time europe, from the 2001/11/07 issue)
"Across the Continent, more than 30 key suspects have been arrested since Sept. 11 for alleged links to Islamic terrorism. That may represent a mere fraction of the criminal potential: Europe is a key destination for many of the 11,000 men, according to FBI estimates, who have passed through al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The bulk of them, presumably, aren’t there anymore. Some of them no doubt left wearied by the physical hardship, numb to the bellicose rhetoric and determined to pursue a peaceful life. But the rest? "They are scattered around the world," said Mohammed al-Massari, a dissident Saudi physicist who moves in London’s militant Muslim circles. "Even if they have nothing to do with al-Qaeda, they take the model of al-Qaeda and do it on their own." The European arrests suggest what a varied group remains committed and underground, set on jihad."

"Bad bargain in Syria" (The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/01)
"While Mr Blair stood there uncomfortably, the Syrian dictator boasted of how Syria was able to deal with his own Islamic radicals (most notably murdering thousands in Hama in 1982); again endorsed the terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah; smeared Israel as a "Nazi" regime (this from a government that harboured actual Nazi war criminals and whose own ideology derives from inter-war European fascism); and attacked the American bombing of Afghanistan. ... Indeed, the Number 10 spokesman further urged that we "not underestimate how difficult it has been for Syria to say that it strongly condemns September 11". Such is the sterling quality of Britain's reliable new partner in the war on terrorism! They're doing so much to help. Mustn't push the poor dears too hard."

"Syria tells Blair: Stop bombing civilians" (Paul Waugh and Andrew Buncombe, Independent, 2001/11/01)
"Tony Blair's vision of a new world order in response to the events of 11 September came up against cold political reality yesterday when Syria's President condemned the military strikes on Afghanistan and hailed Palestinian terrorists as freedom fighters. And in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, Mr Blair's mission suffered a further blow when the Saudi Arabian government failed to pledge support for the US military campaign. ... Earlier in the day, with Mr Blair standing uneasily alongside him, President Assad said: "We cannot accept what we see on the screen every day; hundreds of innocent civilians dying." The Syrian President also compared the "liberation struggle" of militant Palestinian groups to General De Gaulle's efforts to free France from the Nazis in the Second World War."

 

Wednesday, October 31, 2001

News and commentary:

"Elitist contempt for American values" (Walter Williams, TownHall, 2001/10/31)
"College campuses are home to elitists who are out of touch with and have contempt for American values. ... A California Chico State College professor said that President Bush wants to "kill innocent people," "colonize" the Arab world and capture "oil for the Bush family." ... Adam Goldstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison's former campus relations committee chairman, said in a letter to the editor of the Badger Herald that "before you preach at us about the evil terrorists, why don't you try getting your facts straight and face up to the reality that our leaders are war criminals just as much as people like Hitler, Stalin and other monsters of the 20th century." ... As parents, we cough up to $30,000 and sometimes more in tuition money to have our youngsters taught that America is not only a racist, sexist and homophobic nation, but a terrorist nation as well, and an international monster creating world poverty and destroying the planet." (See also: "Al Qaeda's Unwitting Allies" (Young America's Foundation, 2001/10/24) "Rutgers University Professor Barbara Foley wrote that 'whatever its [the terrorist attacks] proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.'", "Academic Freedom: A Time for Reform" (John Taylor, Virginia Viewpoint, October 2001) "For the last three decades, parents and taxpayers have paid ever-increasing amounts for the rising generation to be taught that all cultures are of equal merit; that values are merely social constructs; that morality is relative; that reason and truth are nothing more than tools used to perpetuate white male domination; and that America is racist, sexist, homophobic, and not nearly vegetarian enough", "FIRE and the Aftermath of September 11" (FIRE, October 2001) "Across the nation, in response to the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and to the debates and discussions that have occurred in their wake, many college and university administrators are acting to inhibit the free expression of the citizens of a free society.")

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

News and commentary:

"'72 Black Eyed Virgins': A Muslim Debate on the Rewards of Martyrs" (Yotam Feldner, Inquiry and Analysis No. 74, MEMRI, 2001/10/30)
"The Hamas movement educates the children in its schools, beginning in kindergarten, to believe that a martyr is given virgins in Paradise. Jack Kelley of USA Today visited Hamas schools in Gaza City, where he saw an 11-year-old boy speak to his class: 'I will make my body a bomb that will blast the flesh of Zionists, the sons of pigs and monkeys... I will tear their bodies into little pieces and will cause them more pain than they will ever know.' His classmates shouted in response, 'Allah Akhbar,' and his teacher shouted, 'May the virgins give you pleasure.' A 16-year-old Hamas youth leader in a Gaza refugee camp told Kelley, 'Most boys can't stop thinking about the virgins.'" (See also: "Devotion, desire drive youths to 'martyrdom'" (Jack Kelley, USA Today, 2001/07/05): For some young Muslims, that offer is too much to turn down. "I know my life is poor compared to Europe or America, but I have something awaiting me that makes all my suffering worthwhile," says Bassam Khalifi, 16, a Hamas youth leader in Gaza's Bureij refugee camp. "Most boys can't stop thinking about the virgins." But in the end, says Shaked, the Israeli terrorism expert, most of the bombers don't sign up for martyrdom for the promise of unlimited sex. "They join because of their absolute devotion to God and their desire to die with Jewish blood on their hands," he says. 'It's not a heroic thing, it's a holy thing.'")

"How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science" (Dennis Overbye, The New York Times, 2001/10/30)
"One response to the invasion of Western science, said the scientists, has been an effort to 'Islamicize' science by portraying the Koran as a source of scientific knowledge. Dr. Hoodbhoy said such groups had criticized the concept of cause and effect. Educational guidelines once issued by the Institute for Policy Studies in Pakistan, for example, included the recommendation that physical effects not be related to causes. For example, it was not Islamic to say that combining hydrogen and oxygen makes water. 'You were supposed to say,' Dr. Hoodbhoy recounted, 'that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created.'"

"Ripples of Battle - Fantasies give way to reality" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2001/10/30)
"Pacifists shamed us into thinking that all wars were bad; relativism convinced us that we are no different from our enemies; conflict resolution and peace studies hectored us that there was no such thing as a moral armed struggle of good against evil; and academic specialists preached there was too much complexity in the Middle East ever to act decisively. September 11th and the struggle we are now witnessing have returned us to the classical view of war as a tragic fact inherent to humans that transcends culture when evil exists unchallenged. We may rediscover that it is not wars per se that are always terrible, but the people - Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, and bin Laden - who start them."

"Prime Minister's Speech on the Conflict in Afghanistan" (Tony Blair, 10 Downing Street, 2001/10/30)
"But let us go back to why we are in this conflict. On 11 September, thousands of people were killed in cold blood in the worst terrorist attacks the world has ever seen. That is a fact. Those responsible were the Al Qaida network reared by Usama Bin Laden. That is a fact barely disputed anymore. Incidentally, the intelligence evidence, significant when I first drew attention to it on 3 October, is now a flood, confirming guilt. ... ...if we do not act against Al Qaida and the Taliban, Al Qaida will have perpetrated this atrocity, the Taliban will have sheltered them, and we will have done nothing. We will have done nothing despite the fact, also inescapable, that they intend to commit more atrocities unless we yield to their demands which include the eradication of Israel, the killing of all Jews and the setting up of fundamentalist states in all parts of the Arab and Moslem world."

"Rage of Luton Muslims who want to join Taleban" (Tim Reid, The Times, 2001/10/30)
"Afzal Munir, 25, a newly married business graduate and one of two men from the Bedfordshire town killed in a US rocket attack on Kabul, worshipped at a one-room radical mosque situated in the Call To Islam Bookshop, above an insurance shop in the Dunstable Road. Within a minute of arriving outside the mosque, this Times reporter and cameraman were set upon by a Muslim man, who had rushed, enraged, from a halal butcher shop. 'You insult Islam, you corrupt Islam!' he screamed, smashing the camera to the ground and grabbing another photographer by the throat. 'You don’t understand how angry we Muslims are!' Five other Muslim men joined him, surrounding us, as he demanded the other camera. Their sense of fury was frightening. Five hundred yards away, outside Luton’s Central Mosque, the third largest in the country, Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old accountant, articulated this rage. His words should serve as a warning to Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, who yesterday said British men joining the Taleban would either die in Afghanistan or face prosecution if they returned here. 'They want to die there,' Mr Abdullah said. 'These are well-educated people. They have families. I knew Afzal. He loved his wife. But you must understand: all Muslims in Britain view supporting the jihad (holy war) as a religious duty. All of us are ready to sacrifice our lives for our beliefs. I am jealous of Afzal. He has reached paradise.'"

"UK Muslims 'killed' in Afghanistan" (BBC News, 2001/10/30)
"Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has warned UK Muslims of the dangers of joining the Taleban after three Britons were reportedly killed in Afghanistan. ... Two men from Luton, Bedfordshire, and another man from Crawley, West Sussex, were killed on Wednesday during US-led bombing raids on the Afghan capital of Kabul, a spokesman for Islamic group al-Muhajiroun told the BBC. ... Hasan Butt, leader of the al-Muhajiroun in Lahore, Pakistan, said the men had gone to Afghanistan in early October to wage jihad (holy war) against the unjust policies of America. Mr Butt said: 'We have learned from our contacts that they were martyred by the American bombing on Wednesday.'"

"US warned of more terror attacks" (BBC News, 2001/10/30)
"United States' Attorney General John Ashcroft says there could be more terrorist attacks on the US, or American interests abroad, over the next week. Law enforcement agencies are on the "highest alert" said Mr Ashcroft after the FBI said it had "specific and credible" information."

 

Monday, October 29, 2001

News and commentary:

"Behind Mubarak" (Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2001/10/29)
A must-read report from Cairo on anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism: "[Al-Usbu's] editor, Mustafa Bakri, who is in his forties, was in his office, watching Al-Jazeera, the Pan-Arabic cable channel. He was impeccably dressed, polite and deferential. I had wanted to meet him for some time, ever since I read a translation of a column in which he described a dream. The dream began with his appointment as one of Ariel Sharon's bodyguards, assigned to protect the Israeli Prime Minister at Cairo's airport, and in the column, which appeared in February, he wrote:
'The pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland's soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything: the past and the future, my wife and my children and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig's head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed. . . . The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. The criminal died. I stepped on the pig's head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost.'"

"Lost in the swamp of modernity" (Peter Watson, New Statesman, 2001/10/29)
A critique of Edward W. Said's "The Clash of Ignorance": "The sad - if admittedly bewildering - truth is that "modernity" is in fact more like a swamp, a treacherous landscape where some civilisations can't get a footing. Modernity itself has magnified differences between civilisations and, in so doing, has helped bring terrorism to the point where it takes the form it has. ... What shocked me [during my research] were my interviews with scholars of non-western cultures. Here, I am referring not only to western specialists in the great non-western traditions, but scholars who were themselves born into those traditions - Arab archaeologists or writers, economists and historians from India and China, poets and dramatists from Japan and Africa. All of them - there were no exceptions - said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note. There is no Asian equivalent of, say, Darwin, no African Max Planck, no Arab Freud, no Japanese Picasso or Matisse. When it comes to ideas, the modern world is a western world, a secular world of democracies, free markets, science and self-governing universities. ... Colonialism cannot shoulder all the blame for this, nor can one particular religion. In the realm of ideas, China and Japan are as much underachievers as the Arab and African worlds. At the same time, the evidence is incontrovertible: there is a link between civilisation and intellectual achievement; there is a link between intellectual freedom and political freedom, between the ability to change, on the one hand, and scientific advance, technology-based prosperity and intellectual satisfaction, on the other." (See also: Edward W. Said's "The Clash of Ignorance" (The Nation, 2001/09/22))

"Idiocy Watch #8" (The New Republic, 2001/10/29)
The eighth installment of "the dumb and outrageous things being said and written about America and the terrorists", this time focusing on winners of the Nobel Prize: "'Conjuring the spirit of November 9, 1938.' - Gunter Grass (1999 Prize for Literature) describing the Bush administration's rhetoric in the war on terrorism in The Daily Telegraph. [Grass refers to Kristallnacht, the Nazis' notorious anti-Jewish pogrom.]"

"Noam Chomsky Volunteers to Serve as Domestic Propaganda Chief for Taliban War Machine" (David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine, 2001/10/29)
Chomsky outdoes himself in the genre of lunatic anti-American conspiracy theories: "Well, let's start with right now. So I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan. … Looks like what’s happening is some kind of silent genocide. It indicates that whatever will happen, we don't know, but plans are being made, and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the deaths of several million people in the next – in the next couple of weeks. [i.e, by October 25]. Very casually, with no comment here [i.e. in the US] .… Well, that's what's happening now. What's happening now is very much under our control.… that we’re in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people…" (Noam Chomsky, 2001/10/11) (See also: "The New War Against Terror" (Transcription of "An Evening with Noam Chomsky", zmag.org, 2001/10/18), "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky" (David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine.com, 2001/09/26), "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness" (David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine 2001/10/10), "On the Bombings" (Noam Chomsky, zmag.org, 2001/09/16))

"Church massacre leaves Pakistan in turmoil" (Luke Harding and Rory Carroll, The, 2001/10/29)
On the one hand we have the militant Islamists, who have spoken of West's "Crusaderism" for decades and see every act of the West in the Muslim word as proof of a "crusade". On the other hand George W. Bush unwisely used the word "crusade" once. Guess who's to blame for the massacre according to some?: "Many blamed President George Bush for inciting the majority population by calling the war a 'crusade', evoking a religious clash between Islam and Christianity. Last week Islamists strung a banner emblazoned with the word 'crusade' across the street and some mullahs urged two Christians to be killed for every dead Afghan. 'What Bush said has caused a terrible reaction here and even before the news this morning we were fearful of some sort of revenge," said Father John Nevin, an Irish missionary. 'Now we are even more afraid. I'd say the sitting ducks are the churches.'"

"The Bahawalpur massacre" (The Daily Telegraph, 2001/10/29)
"The gunning down of Christians in a church in Pakistan yesterday confirms one of the worst fears about the war on terrorism. This is that Muslim radicals will succeed in turning it into a struggle between Islam and the other two great religions of Abrahamic descent, between the "faithful" who follow the Prophet Mohammed and the "infidels" who do not. It is such a polarisation that Samuel Huntington predicted eight years ago in his essay on the clash of civilisations."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

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